The Suzerain: Is the judge in McCarthy's Blood Meridian similar to the enigmatic Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness?

Whatever exists, he [the judge] said.  Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked.  He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected.  These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world.  Yet the smallest crumb can devour us.  Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.  Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

Barbarians at the gates

... and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christen reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eyes wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

The University of the Absurd

"Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia.  Like Urban Planning for Gypsies.  The essense of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing's absurdity.  We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antartic agriculutre, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrian-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film."

Jacopo Belbo in Umberto Eco' "Foucault's Pendulum"

Ever watch a seagull?
A seagull at rest will just stand and look into the ether of the air.
Does he think?  Does he remember or have foresight?
In the winter if he gets cold he may switch the legs he is standing on;  the only reaction he gives to the external world.
Nothing in those lifeless eyes.
Does he get bored?  Can he get bored?
Is there a past or a future for him? or just a never-ending present.

- 1/30/09

Post Halloween excerpt from Frankenstein

"Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of thier doting parents; how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb!
Of what material was I made that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture."

Question: Was the fiend in Frankenstein "real" in the novel or was it a metaphor/analogy for some other torment suffered by the protagonist or the author?

Favorite Movie Quotes (post yours in my comments section)

"you're gonna need a bigger boat" - JAWS (1975)

"buzzards gotta eat, same as worms" - The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

"....

The Freedom of the Hills

Oh! What a joy it were in vigorous health,

To have a body, (this our vital frame

With shrinking sensibility endued,

And all the nice regards of flesh and blood)

And to the elements surrender it

As if it were a spirit! - How divine,

The liberty for frail, for mortal man

To roam at large among unpeople glens

And Mountainous retirements, only trod

By devious footsteps; regions consecrate

To oldest time! and reckless of the storm

That keeps the raven quiet in her rest,

Be as a presence or a motion, - one

Among the many there; and while the mists

Flying, and rainy vapors, call out shapes

And phantoms from crags and solid earth

As fast as musician scatters sounds

Out of an instrument; and while the streams

(As at a flight creation and in haste

To exercise their untried faculties)

Descending from the region of the clouds,

And starting from the hollows of the earth

More multitudinous every moment, rend

Their way before them - what a joy to roam

An equal among mightiest energies;

And happy sometimes with articulate voice,

Amid the deafening tumult, scarcely heard

By him that utters it, exclaim aloud,

"Be this continued so from day to day,

Nor let the fierce commotion have to end,

Ruinous through it be, from month to month!"

- Thomas Starr King

Have you ever stepped off the trail
to look more closely at the ladyslipper
and turning back, noticed the forest closed in behind you?
The trail invisible, disappeared
as if it never was.

A look into the past -
before there was one true path, determined by men.
Or is it the future?
When the world will reclaim all paths as true.

"I came," she [Oedipa Maas] said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried [Dr.] Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't ket the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

Remembering D Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we live
in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarel with the foes
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders field.

- Lt. Col. John McCrae (1872 - 1918) [lies buried in Flanders field]

"To be heading into the inexerable...where no mother will care for us...no woman crosses our path...where only reality reigns...with cruelty and grandeur."

The Maiden:
"It's all over! alas, it's all over now!
Go, savage man of bone!
I am still young - go, devoted one!
and do not molest me."

Death:
"Give me your hand, you fair and tender form!
I am a friend; I do not come to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not savage.
You shall sleep gently in my arms."

This poem is the inspiration for Schubert's melancholic and sublime "Death and the Maiden" string quartet.

Gensis of existentialism

One of my favorite excerpts from what I consider to be the primer and template of modern day existentialism.

"Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.

And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

- The unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

One of my favorite English actors also left one of the best suicide notes . . . as far as suicide notes go. Brief, apropos and to the point.

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

- George Sanders

In Memoriam A.H.H.

If Sleep and Death by truly one,
And every spirit's folded bloom
Thro' all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the color of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Reawaken with the dawing soul.

A Devil's Tale

"As I was walking among the fires of hell, delight with the
enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and
insanity, I collected some of thier Proverbs: thinking that as
the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs
of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any
description of buildings of garments."

- From William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Tennyson

'In Love, if Love be Love, if love be ours,
Faith, and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

'It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.

"The little rift within the lover's lute
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

"It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all.'

List of books

Here are a list of great legal books:

The Common Law - Oliver Wendell Holmes
A Matter of Interpretation - Justice Scalia
Active Liberty - Justice Breyer
The Judicial Process - Cardozza
The Death of Contracts - Grant Gilmore

- Enjoy

List of books

Vincent Marconi

Vincent Marconi